The Star Citizen tech is really impressive looking. I love watching their demo videos because they just look amazing.
Their development process seems inefficient from afar. They've switched engines at least once, maybe twice? They've announced titles that then kind of fade into the background. They build really detailed systems for simulating light / gravity / thrust in ways that seem impressive & unrelated to gameplay.
It kind of reminds me of Overgrowth, though with a whole lot more money (and charging users a whole lot more as well). I'd be interested to see, in 5 years or so, what the final-ish product looks like (I don't mean they're 5 years from release, I mean in 5 years they'll be past release).
They've been on CryEngine since the beginning. They've heavily customized large portions of it, to the point that I think one of the devs estimated it was only 50% original code left. They also actually bought a full license to the CryEngine source, and stopped taking any real updates from new versions of CryEngine as the codebases diverged.
They did recently announce that they were "switching" to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, but Lumberyard is itself a particular fork of CryEngine. The switch was primarily about branding and sponsorship. CryTek has been having serious financial issues, while Amazon is busy putting resources into Lumberyard. CIG also just switched all their backend cloud computing from GCE to AWS, and I'm sure they're getting a deal on AWS costs as part of the switch from "CryEngine" to "Lumberyard".
If by "titles that fade into the background" you mean the Squadron 42 single-player campaign... yes and no. Yes, they've been deliberately very quiet about that, because as a single-player game they'd like it to actually be meaningfully new and interesting on release. Also yes, backers are getting a bit antsy wondering where SQ42 progress actually stands at this point. However, it's not like they've abandoned development on SQ42.
Their development process seems inefficient from afar. They've switched engines at least once, maybe twice? They've announced titles that then kind of fade into the background. They build really detailed systems for simulating light / gravity / thrust in ways that seem impressive & unrelated to gameplay.
It kind of reminds me of Overgrowth, though with a whole lot more money (and charging users a whole lot more as well). I'd be interested to see, in 5 years or so, what the final-ish product looks like (I don't mean they're 5 years from release, I mean in 5 years they'll be past release).